The Top Shelf

In 1972, while insisting that he was the wrong person to do so, the British poet Philip Larkin wrote a brief foreword for an Antiquarian Book Fair's program. After all, he said, "I should never call myself a book lover, any more than a people lover: it all depends on what's inside them." He also denied being a book collector, or even knowing how many books he owned. But Larkin did allow that he was a compulsive reader, "and this has meant that books have crept in somehow." So while he did not love or collect books he did need to have books. Many books—and always more books. "Only the other day," he wrote, "I found myself eyeing a patch of wall in my flat and thinking I could get more shelves in there."

More shelves! This is an attitude I can relate to, having crammed the tiny round house my wife and I used to live in with so many straight-cornered bookshelves that I broke toes five times in fourteen years just trying to get into and out of my writing space. In our current, larger, and more rectilinear home, every room teems with bookshelves. The 137.5-square-foot bedroom where I write contains eight bookcases of varying shapes and sizes totaling 114 square feet of shelves. In our living room the previous owner left a prodigious system of built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves that made me giddy when I first saw them.

Like Larkin I am not a book collector, though I will admit to having eighteen foreign and five American editions of my daughter's best-selling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in a glass-fronted bookcase opposite my writing desk. While I am not an indiscriminate book lover, either, the percentages show that I clearly share Larkin's need for books. And I can relate to his organizational approach. He had, he said, designated locations for specific types of books. Novels and detective stories were kept in his bedroom; "the higher forms of literature" and works about jazz were in his sitting room; titles "picked from a bad bunch on a station bookstall" and intended "to speed the parting guest" were in his hall. Shelved in the place of honor, "within reach of my working chair" and just to its left, Larkin kept books by twelve poets: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost, and Owen.

It is a revealing and unsurprising list, providing a gateway into thinking about Larkin's work. His at-hand poets are typically formal, traditional, plainspoken, direct, restrained, observant, and often focused on disappointment or pain or loss. Excluding the flamboyant Whitman—the now obscure nineteenth-century rural clergyman and dialect poet William Barnes (1801-1886), and the even more obscure nineteenth-century politician and humorist Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839)—they are poets you would expect Larkin to have admired, to have turned to for refreshment and example as he worked. They are there, he says, "as exemplars."

I understand the need to keep such work close. It comes not only from the desire to reread or study or gain inspiration, but—at least for me— also from a talismanic impulse. So I too have a group of essential poets within reach of my working chair and just to its left. Not only within reach, but within view, so I can see them at a glance there on the top shelf of a small desktop bookcase. There is something more than admiration involved, something more intimate and emotionally urgent, a deeper connectedness.

My top shelf houses a never-changing essential group of six poets: Frost, Eliot, Bishop, Stevens, Dylan Thomas, and Larkin himself. There is also Thomas Kinsella, the Irish poet with whom I studied and have remained friends for forty-two years, represented by both his Collected Poems and a two-cd compilation of his recorded readings. And there are other poets who rotate on or off the shelf, space currently occupied by Roethke, Williams, Lowell, Sexton, and Kinsella's Irish contemporary John Montague.

As I look...